One of my most fun massage therapy clients likes to update me on his activities and the connection between what he has been doing and what is going on in his neck, back, hands, etc.
I don’t get a laundry list of precarious Christmas lights installations or kneecaps wondering off by themselves on Audubon bird-sighting missions. He gets all of his angst from the mouse.
The past three years have been spent trying to write a non-fiction book. Ahhh, three years of the highs, the lows, the numbing tundras of white screens and spell-checks that cannot tell the difference between wet and whet.
Sometimes it has been the mouse-side shoulder. Deltoids, pecs, infraspinatus and the dreaded Bermuda Triangle of the human body: posterior scalene/trapezius/levator scapula. Oh the pain.
The bulk of writing the book merely took a toll in terms of pain and stiffness. The editing process involved sweaty panic anticipation that flowed up the neck into the sub occipitals, parietals and jaw. Pop goes the tempo-mandibular joint.
Rewrite heck followed. If it is possible for a man to ever experience the pains of childbirth, this author did. I spent several sessions reminding him to breathe through the pain. At one point we even held hands while he practiced.
All told, he has now emerged from the haze and is undergoing the butterflies of seminars and speaking engagements. I am, too, a bit off to the sideline. Dare I say I feel his pain?
He often talked about ideas on solving structural problems in his book while I rubbed a forearm. Sometimes he found the solutions on the middle of the session, when he would slow-breathe like a sleeper, though awake enough to feel my touch and hear the I-Pod.
All told, he has now emerged from the haze and is undergoing the butterflies of seminars and speaking engagements. I am, too, a bit off to the sideline. Dare I say I feel his pain?
The subject of his book, by the way, is the result of a lot of experience and research in the field of education. I asked him to sum it up.
Don’t be a zombie, he said. Be human, care, do the best you can do to touch people’s lives. Stick your finger in the water. You do not know where the ripples will go but they will go far beyond where you will see.
I had to pause. That just might apply to massage, eh?
